EPIC

9 cert, Gameloft, iOS (also An­droid) Where there’s a film, there’s a mo­bile game tie-in . Epic al­lows you to help de­fend the Jinn king­dom, grow­ing new plants and build­ing a for­est all of your own. It’s sim­i­lar to pre­vi­ous film tie-ins such as The Croods; you level up, gain new abil­i­ties and un­lock new items. As usual, there’s a bit of wait­ing around – for plants to grow or build­ings to com­plete. One dif­fer­ence be­tween Epic and its pre­de­ces­sors is a com­bat el­e­ment. Soldiers have to fight the Bog­gan to stop the blight spread­ing and de­fend the for­est. So you have to take on the en­emy fight­ers, mainly by pitch­ing your own troops with spe­cific strengths against them. A mi­nor down point is that Epic re­quires a con­stant in­ter­net con­nec­tion, so there’s no chance of us­ing this game as a means of killing travel bore­dom. Plus, al­though the main app is free, in-app pur­chases are a fea­ture. But the graph­ics are colour­ful and the game­play is straight­for­ward but in­ter­est­ing; a good combo.